In 2008 I took two semesters of Ron Galen's guitar class at Laney College in Oakland (I started a third semester in 2009, but life took over). I hadn't played much fingerstyle to that point ("Blackbird singing in the dead of the night..."), but a little half-size nylon-string guitar I bought in Lima, Peru that spring helped ease me further in to the repertoire. Ron supplied us with a ton of classical études and what not, but his real passion was the Brazilian choro. I recently rediscovered the videos shot of the class playing each of the pieces we worked on over the course of the semester:

Actually, truth be told, what I really rediscovered was the montage that Fer produced from the end-of-semester revelry at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company in Oakland...

Monday, June 28, 2010

This Wednesday's show will air the night before Canada Day. Growing up in Montreal in the 1970s, I can still remember referring to it as Confederation or Dominion Day (the country didn't get its own flag or national anthem until the mid-60s...). But Canada's identity issues notwithstanding, last year July 1 fell on a Wednesday, and toward the end of the one-hour show we paid brief hommage to blues of a Canadian persuasion. This year, however, we'll righteously begin observing Canada Day at sundown on June 30 and spend part of the two-hour show listening to the past, present, and future of blues-y music out of Canada. Start with this article from the Canadian Encyclopedia (uh huh), then tune in Wednesday night.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

This Wednesday will be the third time in my (nearly) five years living in the Bay Area that a certain Canadian band I've been following for most of my adult life will be coming to town. I first saw Blue Rodeo in 1991 (I think), when they played the Shatner Ballroom (yup) in McGill University's Shatner Building (uh-huh) in Montreal. Since then, a festival up north, a couple more shows at Theatre St. Denis, but never in the U.S. until I came to California. That said, theirs have long been my go-to albums for extended head-phoned guitar playing, even though since the mid-90s there's been a bothersome trend of some undisciplined music and wandering lyrics. Their most recent CD, The Things We Left Behind, is a double album in the truest sense, constrained sprawling as is their wont of late.

Now unlike the Tragically Hip, who are reasonably popular just south of the Canadian border, Blue Rodeo has never quite caught fire in the States. Which is just as well, since that may have made it easier to avoid having to justify featuring them on my blues show when the came to town in 2008 on the Small Miracles tour. They were playing at Cafe du Nord, which is not only a tremendously smaller venue than they normally play in Canada, but a place I've played at, for crying out loud. At the time, though it was just a matter of balancing the fact that a little over two years into being a radio professional I was now interviewing people whose career I'd actually been tracking for a (relatively) long time, and what I needed to get from them for the radio show. There we were, Jim and Greg with guitars in hand, and Devon asking if they knew any blues tunes. Seems these singer-songwriter types like to play their own stuff.

The interview certainly went (mostly) fine, though it seemed Jim gradually yielded to Greg in talkativeness. Along with some tunes from the then-new album, I put in a couple of requests from their back catalogue, and they came up with a bluesy Neil Young cover to end the session. You can hear the results on this week's show, where we'll be re-broadcasting most of the interview so that I can make their show at The Independent -- why do they only seem to play San Francisco on Wednesdays?

In the meantime, here's a "web exclusive" for ya, Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor live and unplugged in the Fog City Blues studio: